Conventional home appliances such as wet/dry vacuums have used a caster foot assembly such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,827,564, assigned to Emerson Electric Co., which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. As shown in FIGS. 1 and 2, such prior art caster foot assemblies 2 comprised a body 4, a caster 6 (comprised of a wheel 8, caster fork 9, caster stem 10, and rivet 11) attached to the underside of the body, a raised ring 12 constructed on the upper surface of the body, and a drum mount 16 attached to the body and connectable to a vacuum drum (not shown). Typically, four caster foot assemblies would appear on the underside of the vacuum drum so that the wet/dry vacuum could be easily rolled about the floor. Moreover, this prior art design allowed various vacuum nozzles and other accessories accompanying the wet/dry vacuum to be fitted over raised ring 12 to store such nozzles when not in use.
While these conventional caster foot assemblies were advantageous in that nozzles and other accessories could be secured to the wet/dry vacuum when not in use, such designs were prone to tipping, in part because the center of gravity of the wet/dry vacuum was raised to accommodate both the raised ring 12 and the caster 6, as shown in cross-section in FIG. 2. Furthermore, it was relatively difficult to store the nozzles on the prior art raised ring design because the nozzles had to be slide-fitted at an angle almost exactly parallel with the side walls of the raised ring in order to fit the nozzle over the raised ring 12.
The present invention discloses a caster foot assembly which overcomes these problems encountered in the prior art.